Dataset Information

Using word embeddings to improve the privacy of clinical notes.

ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE:In this work, we introduce a privacy technique for anonymizing clinical notes that guarantees all private health information is secured (including sensitive data, such as family history, that are not adequately covered by current techniques). MATERIALS AND METHODS:We employ a new "random replacement" paradigm (replacing each token in clinical notes with neighboring word vectors from the embedding space) to achieve 100% recall on the removal of sensitive information, unachievable with current "search-and-secure" paradigms. We demonstrate the utility of this paradigm on multiple corpora in a diverse set of classification tasks. RESULTS:We empirically evaluate the effect of our anonymization technique both on upstream and downstream natural language processing tasks to show that our perturbations, while increasing security (ie, achieving 100% recall on any dataset), do not greatly impact the results of end-to-end machine learning approaches. DISCUSSION:As long as current approaches utilize precision and recall to evaluate deidentification algorithms, there will remain a risk of overlooking sensitive information. Inspired by differential privacy, we sought to make it statistically infeasible to recreate the original data, although at the cost of readability. We hope that the work will serve as a catalyst to further research into alternative deidentification methods that can address current weaknesses. CONCLUSION:Our proposed technique can secure clinical texts at a low cost and extremely high recall with a readability trade-off while remaining useful for natural language processing classification tasks. We hope that our work can be used by risk-averse data holders to release clinical texts to researchers.

SUBMITTER: Abdalla M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7309261 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Using word embeddings to improve the privacy of clinical notes.

Abdalla Mohamed M Abdalla Moustafa M Rudzicz Frank F Hirst Graeme G

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 20200601 6

<h4>Objective</h4>In this work, we introduce a privacy technique for anonymizing clinical notes that guarantees all private health information is secured (including sensitive data, such as family history, that are not adequately covered by current techniques).<h4>Materials and methods</h4>We employ a new "random replacement" paradigm (replacing each token in clinical notes with neighboring word vectors from the embedding space) to achieve 100% recall on the removal of sensitive information, unac ...[more]

PMID: 32388549

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Project description:BackgroundCytokines are a class of small proteins that act as chemical messengers and play a significant role in essential cellular processes including immunity regulation, hematopoiesis, and inflammation. As one important family of cytokines, tumor necrosis factors have association with the regulation of a various biological processes such as proliferation and differentiation of cells, apoptosis, lipid metabolism, and coagulation. The implication of these cytokines can also be seen in various diseases such as insulin resistance, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. Considering the interdependence between this kind of cytokine and others, classifying tumor necrosis factors from other cytokines is a challenge for biological scientists.MethodsIn this research, we employed a word embedding technique to create hybrid features which was proved to efficiently identify tumor necrosis factors given cytokine sequences. We segmented each protein sequence into protein words and created corresponding word embedding for each word. Then, word embedding-based vector for each sequence was created and input into machine learning classification models. When extracting feature sets, we not only diversified segmentation sizes of protein sequence but also conducted different combinations among split grams to find the best features which generated the optimal prediction. Furthermore, our methodology follows a well-defined procedure to build a reliable classification tool.ResultsWith our proposed hybrid features, prediction models obtain more promising performance compared to seven prominent sequenced-based feature kinds. Results from 10 independent runs on the surveyed dataset show that on an average, our optimal models obtain an area under the curve of 0.984 and 0.998 on 5-fold cross-validation and independent test, respectively.ConclusionsThese results show that biologists can use our model to identify tumor necrosis factors from other cytokines efficiently. Moreover, this study proves that natural language processing techniques can be applied reasonably to help biologists solve bioinformatics problems efficiently.

Dataset Information

Using word embeddings to improve the privacy of clinical notes.

Publications

Using word embeddings to improve the privacy of clinical notes.

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